Since there’s an on-disk canvas cache, could it in theory be possible to implement some kind of process of generating mipmaps for said canvases in the background and hooking them up to the texture streaming system? (Perhaps in another thread or with the GPU, and/or gradually over time to prevent hitching)
I’m just trying to think of ways to make it so that lots of canvases don’t devour your VRAM like a fat boy in a golden corral when they’re not in view. (Often causing the entire map to turn blurry, unless you turn texture streaming off entirely, which is bad for obvious reasons.)
If possible, a similar thing for workshop models would be great too, especially considering there’s a lot of models with ridiculous texture resolutions.
Hmm, wonder if when being cached, some processing can be done to pad them up to the nearest power of two (rounding up) before storing? Also, I thought modern GPUs allowed for non-power-of-two textures and mipmaps already. Guessing more of a UE4 limitation?
Gosh, at least having only canvases in some radius loading for you would already improve the disaster happening when joining a condo with hundreds, if not thousands of them
Everything I’m reading so far about UE4 seems to indicate padding up (never down lest you want to kill quality, though this could be useful as an option for those with extremely low VRAM) to the nearest power of two is probably the best route to take here. It would allow the engine to generate the appropriate mipmaps. Dunno however, which would look cleaner: Padding with full alpha, or using the color/alpha of the edges. Probably the latter.
Not to be a pain in the ass, but SOMETHING needs to be done about the VRAM consumption. I have only around 100mb of Canvas data, I have 8gb of VRAM (with INI tweaks to make sure the game actually uses most of it, otherwise it gets blurry even sooner), and textures are set to Ultra, but I get this:
It helps, but unfortunately it has major problems of it’s own, like poor stability, and potentially thrashing your page file if the memory usage ends up being absolutely insane.
No passive process that could be done to the cache after the fact? (Load the image from the website, cache it, then do some form of padding to nearest power of two on another thread, saving it back to the cache, then using that? Or if that can’t be done, what about a way to do this manually, or an option to automatically do this process during load screens?)
Not without significant changes to the engine, and on top of that we can’t use any of the editor code (that has mipmap generation in it) as it’s a closed source license (unlike the engine itself).
Upon further inspection, it looks like UE4 allows you to set a texture’s mips in realtime via pointers to raw pixel data, but you’re going to need to generate said data yourself. If you have a reasonable level of knowledge of C++, this isn’t too terrible of a task. Mind you, you’re going to be limited to powers of two still. (Even that is better than nothing. Honestly hate that UE4 has this limitation, I’ve worked with ancient (by today’s standards) game engines that handle NPOT mipmapped textures without issue.)
TL;DR: Load canvases as-is, do background conversion/mip generation in another thread, write it to cache in a GPU-compatible format (maybe let the user pick DXT5 for lower memory use but lower quality, or RGBA8 for full quality in settings). When done, set the pointers to the pixel data for each mip level accordingly. Flush unconverted canvas.
Hope this helps to some degree. My UE4 knowledge is extremely limited (not a fan of it, so I moved on after experimenting with it a little), but I do have some amount of experience with writing my own renderer (specifically an OpenGL renderer for a source port of Hellbender), so I’ve had to deal with loading and converting texture data, procedural generation of textures in realtime, among other things, so if there’s anything about that particular aspect that I can shed a light on, feel free to ask.
The situation is getting desperate. The game eats up all 16gb of my VRAM, I have about 100-ish canvases, 200 workshop models, most are incredibly low poly with low res textures (I’m talking N64/Gamecube era low. Recently made sure to nuke anything with stupidly high res ones, which has let some of the textures stream back in to reasonable quality, but stability is still not there). The canvases are 1024x1024 or less.
I’m on the resort condo, I’ve decorated about 3 suites out of the 12 total. The game frequently bluescreens or hard-locks my PC, forcing me to reset with the power button. TU, on that condo, is the only game to do this to me. Also to add to the strangeness, is that the VRAM use is nearly half that of the host for clients joining the server. It honestly doesn’t make much sense.
Please, if anything, get workshop model streaming working. Even if it means I have to pay someone directly to get it done. It would go a long way to helping the situation. Especially in the Plaza where you can have 50+ people with different workshop player models just absolutely devouring memory.
